I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications systems and more particularly to carrier timing.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communication for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations via transmissions on the forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. This communication link may be established via a single-in-single-out, multiple-in-single-out or a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) system.
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas and multiple (NR) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS independent channels, which are also referred to as spatial channels, where NS≦min {NT, NR}. Each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
A MIMO system supports a time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. In a TDD system, the forward and reverse link transmissions are on the same frequency region so that the reciprocity principle allows the estimation of the forward link channel from the reverse link channel. This enables the access point to extract transmit beamforming gain on the forward link when multiple antennas are available at the access point.
Multi-carrier HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology enhances capability of communication systems to transmit packet data traffic in comparison to single-carrier HSDPA. While establishment and maintenance of control channels (HS-SCCH—High-Speed Shared Control Channel, HS-SICH—High-Speed Shared Information Channel) and traffic channel (HS-DSCH—High-Speed Downlink Shared Channel) is simpler in single-carrier HSDPA systems, it does not meet the requirements of multi-carrier transmission of HSDPA. Employing a plurality of carriers in a communication system leads to complexity in reception and decoding of carriers at both Node B and UE. Hence, solutions can be explored for simplifying transmission/reception of multiple carriers while retaining advantages afforded by the multi-carrier HSDPA technology.